IT buyers must demand open standards as balance of power shifts in their favour

Computer Weekly - The old cliché about open standards has never been truer - that the great thing about them is there are so many to choose from.

Look at the Wikipedia page on the topic, for example. It lists 20 different definitions of what an open standard is, and at least 30 different specifications all of which claim to be a definitive open standard in their field.

Lack of standards leads only to single supplier dominance - the effective standard for PCs for 25 years has been Windows, and for all the benefits that has delivered, it still leaves many organisations locked into Microsoft.

The same is happening in the cloud today - Amazon Web Services has become the dominant player by building an ecosystem based on its technology and APIs. Azure and Google are playing catch-up - but with no interoperability between clouds. More than ever, users are demanding cloud standards to prevent a repeat of the past.